There was a terrible fire in a liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) plant. It destroyed piping and a critical air cooler (fin fan) and damaged pumps, valves, cables and supports. Fortunately, although there were injuries, no one died.
As it commonly happens, this was at the peak of demand, with every barrel of LPG salable at premium price. The downtime cost was more than $500,000 per day.
The owners worked frantically to reengineer the process piping and use alternate coolers. Pumps and valves went to the shop for emergency refurbishment.
Miraculously, the plant was ready for start-up within three weeks.
All went well until the LPG ‘bottoms system’ was started up. This process equipment had not been in the fire and was still as originally designed. Seals on the bottom’s pumps leaked. Each time they were repaired, they leaked again after a matter of hours. All the carbon seal faces in stores were consumed. The shop had to reverse engineer the seal faces and manufacture them from carbon rods while waiting for emergency shipments from the seal vendor.
People remembered issues a long time ago, but none had facts. The records for the plant’s commissioning 15 years prior were incomplete. None of the operating changes or maintenance history had been documented since then. Baseline data for smooth operations hadn’t been captured.
After four days and a total downtime cost of $2,000,000, the last set of OEM seals was installed and everything was ready for start-up. It was so critical that the senior vice president of production was on-site in the control room watching the displays. Twelve years before, he was the operating foreman for the plant.
Suddenly, he said, “Why is the level in the bottoms column less than 40 percent? Everyone knows that when it drops below that, the pump seals leak.”
The level was raised above 40 percent and the seals held.
Everyone would have known the level should be kept above 40 percent if it was documented and available.
The lack of good data governance practices cost the company more than $2,000,000 in lost revenue and every seal leak could have caused another fire.
